Kutmah - TROBBB!

What would be the beat and/or hip-hop music for those music fans that do not necessarily listen to either beats or hip-hop? Such music not only exists, but is usually that which you refer to more often than you think you would, something that actually crosses quite a few musical borders. In essence, something you can truly call experimental music. The first things that come to mind are RZA’s soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, as well as any Madlib, Odd Nosdam or Gonjasufi album. And that is where we come to Kutmah and his TROBBB! album.

Don’t wonder what the title means, it's actually an acronym for The Revenge of the Black Belly Button. Maybe the long title is a way to let you know that there are a whopping thirty-one tracks here and a list of contributors as long as an arm of a professional basketball player; fifteen by my last count, including one of the above-mentioned names, Gonjasufi. Why do I single him out? Because Kutmah’s debut solo album is as good as any of the five Gonjasufi has made himself.

These days, almost every single press release uses the term “long awaited,” even when nobody even knew the album was coming out. In the case of Kutmah though, that overused term actually applies. He’s been on the beat scene for a while. Artists like Flying Lotus have been raving about him for a while, and Giles Peterson gave him the opportunity to compile an album, Kutmah Presents Worldwide Family Vol. 2 for his Brownswood Recordings label. The reasons for the raves are obvious from the moment the title song opens the album.

Kutmah shows the perfect sense of which sounds and beats to introduce, and realises exactly how long they should hang around in your speakers. Only two titles here pass the three minute mark, and some are as brief as eight seconds. The deeper you get into TROBBB!, the more you realise why the Ghost Dog soundtrack and all those other abovementioned names come to mind. The music here is more on the meditative, gentle side of the beats (with some more sinister sounding electronics cropping up here and there), and as the voice in “Change Things” keeps on repeating, it is here to create the vibe.

Many beat musicians set out to do exactly that, with a tendency to miss the mark, overstay their welcome, or both. Not Kutmah. He sounds like a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and why. Moreover, he sounds like somebody who has the right feel for this or any other kind of music. This is indeed one of the beats/hip-hop albums that even music fans that normally shy away from these genres will find appealing.